I have been using the Breville dual boiler great bang for your buck with the Breville smart grinder with this set up makes great coffee, I got sick and tired of paying good money for bad coffee with this and fresh roasted beans fantastic . Look at the review on here.

The Speedster by Kees van der Westen, the La Marzocco GS/3, the Faema E61 Legend S1, the Elektra Sixties Deliziosa T1, the Rocket Espresso R58 to name but a few. ;-)

But seriously, those machines all cost several thousand bucks. Your question is like asking "What are some good cars?". The answer might be Mercedes, Porsche, Ferrari, Bentley, Audi ... What I'm trying so say is, it all depends on your personal needs and your budget.

Give us the answer on the following questions and me might tell you some good espresso machines for your purpose.

How many cups a day, and how many cups per session is the machine supposed to brew?

What kind of coffee drinks will be consumed: mainly espresso or also espresso based milk drinks like cappuccino or latte?

The most important part of any espresso set up is the grinder. You must budget for the grinder. At the starter low end you will spend more for the grinder than the machine.

Those machines Nobby named are huge bucks - like starting at 3k and going up. My set up cost about 1k with me buying a used machine. You can make do with cheaper but if you are in the less than $100 range you probably will not get espresso unless you are really lucky on craigslist. $300 is doable with used machine and a hand grinder. $500-700 is a good starter budget. I started out wanting to spend about $100 on a good coffee maker that could do espresso and researched my way up to a $300 budget.... then researched some more and was at 500 as the top of the top end. Then I ended up spending 10 times my starting budget. But I have not wanted to upgrade in 6 months and I can probably get 10+ years out of my machine.

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